Documentary film by Lise Yasui that chronicles her exploration of her family's hidden history—especially that of her paternal grandfather,
Masuo Yasui
—through interviews and family home movies and photographs. One of the most acclaimed films about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans,
Family Gathering
was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.

Synopsis

Told in the first-person voiceover narration by filmmaker Lise Yasui, the film begins with an image of Masuo and how Lise learned about his arrest after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which makes her wonder what else she didn't know. She then cuts to her father Robert Yasui's home movie footage of her childhood in Pennsylvania where she was born. We learn of Masuo's prewar story: migration from Okayama, Japan, becoming a successful businessman and community leader in Hood River, Oregon, marrying his wife Shidzuye and having nine children. The narrator recalls hearing many stories about her grandparents, but that "decades were missing from our history." Even when she went to Hood River in 1984 with a movie camera hoping to fill gaps in the family history with the help of another uncle, "I was continually reminded of the family's success, but no one mentioned any difficulties."

Upon her return, she reads books on Japanese Americans and perused family albums and scrapbooks which told a different story. Interviews with her uncle Homer Yasui and aunt Yuka Yasui Fujikawa reveal the racism they and their family faced in Hood River despite their family's relative success. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, Masuo is arrested and spends the next four years in internment camps. Most of the rest of the family is rounded up with the mass removal and incarceration of all West Coast Japanese Americans. One exception is Robert, who decides on "voluntary evacuation," taking a bus to Denver. Another uncle,
Minoru
decides to test the constitutionality of the curfew and removal in the courts and his case becomes one of four that eventually reach the Supreme Court. The voices of Masuo and Shidzuye are added through their letters, which are read in voiceover. When the war ends, Lise's father Robert is in medical school. She comes to realize that the old home movies of her childhood were her father's "celebration of a new life. For me they represented the boundary between the father I knew and the father whose real feelings about his past might always remain hidden from me."

While the rest of family had been released, Masuo remains interned at
Santa Fe
until five months after the war had ended. Now 61, he faced an uncertain future with his former prosperity gone. But when the
Immigration Act of 1952
passed, allowing Issei to become naturalized citizens, Masuo threw himself into preparing for the citizenship test and proudly became a citizen in 1953. But awareness of the doubts about him sowed in the minds of others due to his long internment haunted him. Robert tells Lise finally that Masuo ended up committing suicide at age 71. Showing the same home movie footage as at the beginning of the film, the narrator concludes that "now I watch these movies and everything looks a little different. I'm aware of the history that lies behind these images." The film ends with an epigraph about Min's
coram nobis
case
and subsequent activism.

Background and Reaction

Fimmaker Lise Yasui is the daughter of Robert Shu Yasui (1923–2012) and Phyllis L. Hoffman Yasui (1930–2015). After graduating as valedictorian of his high school class in Hood River, Oregon, in 1941, Robert enrolled at the University of Oregon and became a "
voluntary evacuee
" after plans for the mass forced incarceration of Japanese Americans were announced. He ended up in Philadelphia where he graduated from Temple Medical School in 1947 and opened up a surgical practice in Williamsport after a stint in the army. Phyllis, of European descent, was raised in Jersey Shore, New Jersey, the daughter of a pastor. She and Robert met at the Williamsport Hospital Nursing School, and they married in 1952.
[1]

Raised as the only Japanese Americans in Williamsport, the five Yasui children saw the rest of the large Yasui family only occasionally. Lise came to know the family through the home movies Shu took of a trip to Oregon before she was born. While she wrote school papers on the family's story in both high school and at the University of Pennsylvania, she still felt she knew little of the story and, after entering the film program at Temple University, decided to make a documentary about the incarceration. Beginning with the aim of doing a conventional documentary, it evolved into a more personal film when family members told her contradictory stories. When Masuo finally told her about Masuo's death, she knew it was the climax of the film, but also realized that it would be a sensitive moment to include. Over the next few years, she was able to convince family members to allow her to include the scene.
[2]

Finished in 1988 as a thirty-minute short, it won awards at several festivals, including a Golden Globe at the San Francisco International Film Festival and a Golden Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. WGBH, a Boston public television station, approached her about turning it into an hour-long film to be shown nationally as part of
The American Experience
series and offering funding. Again, she struggled to get her family's permission for airing before what would now be a much larger audience. But the film's nomination for an academy award for best documentary short helped to confer legitimacy on it, easing familial concerns. The longer version aired nationally in the fall of 1989.
[3]

Reviews

Chalfen, Richard. "Review of
Family Gathering
."
American Anthropologist
, New Series 91.2 (1989): 525–27. ["
Family Gathering
is a beautiful film that is both emotionally and intellectually superb; it addresses problematic relationships between biographical and autobiographical film, historiography, and contemporary interests in the personal, social, and cultural constructions of memory and history—all of which have important lessons for visual anthropology."]

Daniels, Roger.
The Journal of American History
77.3 (Dec. 1990): 1120. ["This perceptive and well-made film can be used to good effect to illustrate some of the nuances of this American tragedy for audiences who have already mastered its basic details."]

Learn more in the Densho Encyclopedia, a free on-line resource covering the key concepts, people, events, and organizations that played a role in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Geography

Point of View

Theme

Availability

Free On Web

Teacher Guide

Learn more in the Densho Encyclopedia, a free on-line resource covering the key concepts, people, events, and organizations that played a role in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Useful Links

The Resource Guide to Media on the Japanese American Removal and Incarceration is a free project of Densho. Our mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. We offer these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy, and promote equal justice for all.